All posts by Elise Fleischaker, EVP Marketing

NDSU TT CampusConnect

By Drs. William W Wilson and Frayne Olson, North Dakota State University

The job market in agriculture has been particularly robust over the past 5-10 years.¹ This is partly in response to the retrenchment that happened in many companies about 10 years ago along with the evolving demographics of many agricultural firms. There are a multitude of other reasons for this including the escalation in economies of transactions, greater risk, ethanol and energy trading (e.g., oil and electricity) that tends to attract grain traders, and, importantly, a fairly robust view of agriculture by many companies. Indeed, some firms have indicated that their growth is limited only by their inability to hire enough well-qualified individuals.

As a result of these changes, most agriculture programs in the United States have benefited with increased enrollments (although this has increased the challenges in teaching) and placements, particularly for those who are well trained.
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Last week at the TT Tech Tap, we hosted a sponsor-appreciation event for a terrific non-profit group called A Leg To Stand On (ALTSO). Several talented folks who have day jobs in our industry entertained the crowd with live music, and proceeds raised went to provide relief for the Nepal earthquake victims. We even got featured on Chicago’s WGN-TV news in a story about local Nepal fundraisers.

A Leg To Stand On (ALTSO)

You might have heard of ALTSO and their Rocktoberfest events, which take place each October in New York and Chicago. TT is proud to be associated with ALTSO and their mission of providing free orthopedic care to kids around the world who suffer from limb disabilities. Last week’s event was aimed at recognizing ALTSO’s many corporate sponsors while also attracting support from additional firms in the industry.

I sat down with two industry veterans and long-time friends, Chuck Mackie and Ray McKenzie, to talk about their personal involvement with ALTSO, the group’s mission, their upcoming events and how others can help.

Ray McKenzie, co-chairman of the ALTSO Chicago Rocktoberfest Committee.
Ray McKenzie, co-chairman of the ALTSO
Chicago Rocktoberfest Committee.

Elise: What can you tell us about ALTSO and how the group became connected to our industry?

Ray: ALTSO was founded by C. Mead Welles, who has worked for emerging market hedge funds most of his career and traveled frequently in the developing world. He was deeply affected by the children he saw on the streets of some of the cities he visited and wanted to find a way to really change their lives. Mead is a musician, and ALTSO started as a group of like-minded members from the financial industry getting together to perform for their peers to raise donations. With the proceeds raised for ALTSO, Mead was able to establish a global network of doctors and healthcare workers to truly transform children in need with free operations and prosthetic limbs for the life of the child up to age 18.

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Rob Wherry, MBA student, and Michelle Golojuch, finance and accountancy major, track a stock on a Bloomberg terminal in DePaul’s Finance Lab. The virtual trading room contains the latest in high-tech trading, investing and finance software.
The statement from the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) meeting in January had barely been made public before DePaul University finance student Arman Hodzic saw the reaction in the markets. Hodzic watched in real time as the Standard & Poor’s 500 Index and the yield on the 10-year Treasury reacted to the news.

Traders and investors were responding to the Federal Reserve’s statements on monetary policy. Prior to the announcement, Hodzic and his partners, fellow undergraduate students Alex Netzel, Dhruvish Shah and Brendan Newell, used Trading Technologies ADL® (Algo Design Lab) to create an algorithm that would take long positions on the market and hopefully earn them virtual profits.

Hodzic and his team used specially engineered keyboard terminals created by Bloomberg L.P. to access real-time market data to see the pendulum-swinging Treasury yields and the S&P in vivid charts, graphs and numbers.

They waited patiently, watching the “iceberg” algorithm they created execute automatic trading actions. At the end of their trading they had a simulated $33,000 profit.

“The market was acting really wildly and we profited off that,” says Hodzic. He was one of about 40 students enrolled in a “Money and Banking” course who participated in the simulated trading event at DePaul on Jan. 28. They experienced firsthand how announcements by the FOMC, a Federal Reserve committee charged with setting monetary policy, can precipitate a flurry of investment and trading activity.
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KCG’s Samantha Coyne.

Last month, we announced we will be giving our X_TRADER and TT platform users connectivity to KCG Fixed Income, which provides direct access to on-the-run U.S. Treasury liquidity. This will be the first time we will offer a link to liquidity from a non-exchange provider.

As stated in our joint announcement: “With this new connection to KCG, TT will provide professional traders with a consolidated point of access to multiple sources of global fixed income liquidity. With the upcoming server-side Aggregator, customers will be able to consolidate the display and introduce smart order-routing logic when trading complex strategies across multiple U.S. Treasury markets.”

I recently talked with Samantha Coyne, head of fixed income client services for KCG, to discuss the KCG offering and how Trading Technologies’ customers can leverage this new offering. Read on for her insight.

TT: We are very excited to establish connectivity to KCG’s Fixed Income liquidity. Can you tell us a bit more about the origination of this offering?

KCG: Well first, I want to say what a pleasure it is to be part of the TT family. What we deliver to your network is a bi-lateral market maker that provides strong two-way liquidity in on-the-run U.S. Treasuries. This solution officially started within GETCO in October 2012 and has seen significant growth over the past two years. This unique market making offering is now managed under the KCG umbrella as a result of the strategic merger of Knight Capital and GETCO in the summer of 2013.
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This past year, the McKinsey Center for Government released the second report in its “Education to Employment” series titled Education to Employment: Designing a System that Works.

The numbers are somewhat staggering: 75 million young people worldwide are unemployed because they do not possess the skills that industry demands. These young people are three times more likely to be unemployed than their parents. The labor force is available and the jobs are open, but the skills are lacking.

The question is complex: exactly how can we better synchronize the stakeholders–i.e., the students, the universities and the employers— to improve this situation and put more qualified grads into the workforce? Before we consider solutions, let’s take a closer look at some sobering statistics.

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